Endoscopy image enhancement method by generalized imaging defect models based adversarial training.

Journal: Physics in medicine and biology
PMID:

Abstract

Smoke, uneven lighting, and color deviation are common issues in endoscopic surgery, which have increased the risk of surgery and even lead to failure.In this study, we present a new physics model driven semi-supervised learning framework for high-quality pixel-wise endoscopic image enhancement, which is generalizable for smoke removal, light adjustment, and color correction. To improve the authenticity of the generated images, and thereby improve the network performance, we integrated specific physical imaging defect models with the CycleGAN framework. No ground-truth data in pairs are required. In addition, we propose a transfer learning framework to address the data scarcity in several endoscope enhancement tasks and improve the network performance.Qualitative and quantitative studies reveal that the proposed network outperforms the state-of-the-art image enhancement methods. In particular, the proposed method performs much better than the original CycleGAN, for example, the structural similarity improved from 0.7925 to 0.8648, feature similarity for color images from 0.8917 to 0.9283, and quaternion structural similarity from 0.8097 to 0.8800 in the smoke removal task. Experimental results of the proposed transfer learning method also reveal its superior performance when trained with small datasets of target tasks.Experimental results on endoscopic images prove the effectiveness of the proposed network in smoke removal, light adjustment, and color correction, showing excellent clinical usefulness.

Authors

  • Wenjie Li
    Yunnan Agricultural University, Kunming, China.
  • Jingfan Fan
    Department of Radiology and BRIC, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
  • Yating Li
    Beijing Engineering Research Center of Mixed Reality and Advanced Display, School of Optics and Photonics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, People's Republic of China.
  • Pengcheng Hao
    Beijing Engineering Research Center of Mixed Reality and Advanced Display, School of Optics and Photonics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, People's Republic of China.
  • Yucong Lin
    Center for Statistical Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, Beijing, China; Department of Industrial Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, Beijing, China.
  • Tianyu Fu
  • Danni Ai
  • Hong Song
    School of Software, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China.
  • Jian Yang
    Drug Discovery and Development Research Group, College of Pharmacy and Nutrition, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada.